This article is literally about the decline of Valve’s headset sales, and concludes: With the Meta Quest 3 on the horizon, PCVR could potentially benefit from another surge in popularity of VR in general but are these three companies enough to ensure the constant flow of big-budgeted VR gaming? Can the market ever mature into something that can be taken seriously by the masses for leisure purposes in the far future? Each company with its own ecosystem and communities. If you look at VR gaming now and for the foreseeable future only three major players are sustaining the entire market Meta, Sony and Valve. The question is: Can Valve really afford to replicate the longevity of the Switch in the VR market and eke out several more years? Or have they silently halted their VR ventures indefinitely? And even if they decide to release a new product, is the ecosystem there to warrant a new device? By then, the Valve Index would make it to seven years of shelf-life before being replaced with a “next-gen” SKU such as the Switch. Whether or not they will choose to wait it out for another three years (circa 2027) before releasing a new product of this category remains to be seen. While Valve had once promoted Index in various places on the Steam storefront, now Steam Deck appears more often to be put in front of Steam’s huge audience of users:Ī great product and it makes sense that Valve are playing the long game here much like the Nintendo Switch. The turn also came around the new year heading from 2022 into 2023.Įspecially considering that actual usage of the headset remains strong, our best guess is that sales of Index have trended downward largely because Valve has shifted the spotlight to Steam Deck possibly even more so after the company saw how well the device sold through the 2022 holiday season. The downturn began happening some six to eight months after Valve released Steam Deck-the company’s first hardware product since Index. The exact reason for the somewhat sudden change in trend is unclear, but we have one hypothesis. The data is at times sparse for most of the dataset we only know the top 10 products by weekly revenue (if Index fell under the top 10 we don’t know exactly how far it fell), but Steam recently began sharing the top 100, giving us a clearer insight into the downward trend of Index sales.
#VALVE TO PROVIDE SOME STEAM SALES ARCHIVE#
Thanks to SteamDB’s archive of the data, we’ve been able to get a rough trend of the headset’s sales performance over the years. While usage of Index remains strong, sales of the headset appear to be in decline after years of holding steady.Īlthough Valve doesn’t share how much revenue individual products make on its platform, Steam does rank the top selling products, by revenue, each week.
#VALVE TO PROVIDE SOME STEAM SALES PC#
Even with just one headset, that makes Valve the second largest headset vendor on the platform.ĭespite PC VR headsets that have launched since with higher resolution or OLED displays or even a cheaper price, the headset’s balance of comfort, visuals, sound, tracking, and controllers have made it a popular choice long after its spec sheet would suggest. Despite the $1,000 price tag and the headset’s age, Index remains the second most-used headset on Steam at 18.38% of active headsets on the platform (though a distant second to Quest 2 at 42.05%) as of June 2023. And by many measures it accomplished that goal. Valve launched Index with the goal of setting the bar for PC VR headsets to beat. Despite its age, the headset continued to sell at a surprising rate over the years-but as they say, nothing lasts forever. Valve’s Index VR headset is now more than four years old.
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